Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again, and welcome to Off The Fence – the frivolous, freewheeling companion to our unflappably chic magazine. You will, we trust, be delighted to know that Issue 12 is not far off the horizon, with everything on track for an early summer release. We’re not at liberty to share too much at this stage, but we can say with unshakeable confidence that you’re going to be very excited about some of the stories in the pipeline. It’s going to be a good one, so mark your calendars for July.
In the meantime, we’ve just been stocked at WH Smith (which ones? These ones), and to celebrate this milestone on the march to world domination, we’re launching a competition. If you send us a snap of Issue 11 on the shelf of your local Smith’s on Twitter or Instagram, we have two huge prizes for you: an ultra-rare copy of Issue 8, which there is sincerely only one copy left of, and a bottle of champagne. Aldi champagne, but champagne all the same. This is perhaps the last chance for any completists to snatch up one of the gems from our back catalogue, and the point of entry couldn’t be simpler, so happy snapping.
We’ve managed to pull together a few new featurettes for you all today; the usual hash of gossip, ephemera, invective and trivia from the weirder fringes of high & low society. Before we begin, we have a dispatch from the medievalist Mary Flannery, chronicling her pre-academia life as The Person On The Other End of The Spam Call That Just Went Off In Your Pocket.
Calling Out of Context
‘Hello?’
‘…Hello! My name is Mary and I’m calling from a university in England. We’re doing a survey regarding mobile phone usage. Is there any chance you might be willing to answer a few questions? It’ll only take a couple of minutes, and—’
‘Fuck off.’
And so ended my very first cold call experience, which took place sometime shortly after 4am GMT, a little over 15 years ago. For the ‘gentleman’ who had just hung up on me, however, it was a totally different time of day: whereas I was sitting in a university classroom, he was at an undisclosed location in New Zealand.
Along with a dozen or so other less-than-solvent graduate students, I had decided that getting up at oh-dark-hundred and calling random people around the world for a week was a great way to earn a little extra cash. Sure, I was sitting in a tiny plastic chair with an L-shaped plywood desktop screwed onto one arm, and yes, I was occasionally being yelled at by strangers. But it was only for a week, at the end of which I would walk away with a little over £500 in payment for my services.
My comrades and I were taking part in the Mobinet survey conducted by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. As it was explained to us, the goal of the survey was to find out how people around the world used their mobile phones, presumably so that someone somewhere could design some new, exciting and expensive ones. Each of us were assigned to a different part of the globe, and given lists of randomly generated phone numbers to call in countries within that time zone.
It didn’t come easy. As a kid, I’d been too shy to even place my own orders at restaurants—whenever possible, I’d get my parents or even my little sister to do it for me. But cold calling was a level beyond, not least because I’d witnessed how my mother treated cold callers. I have vivid childhood memories of her standing in the kitchen in her white terrycloth robe, damp hair still wrapped in a towel, with one hand on her hip as she cross-examined whichever unfortunate soul had dared to call our house that morning. ‘Who am I speaking to?’, ‘Where are you calling from?’, and ‘Who are you working for?’ would issue from her mouth with the speed of machine-gun fire, soon followed by a stern lecture on the evils of telemarketing and telephone surveys. Even as a child, I thought: Nobody should be subjected to that ordeal.
And yet I took the cold calling gig, and more than once. It was five-hundred quid - five-hundred quid!
With a group of us working the antipodean late-shift, some students got to call Japan and South Korea, and their answers felt like peering into some distant future. Whereas I could never get an answer to questions like ‘do you watch TV on your mobile phone?’, this was a totally mundane occurrence to our Japanese respondents. Not only did many of them watch TV on their mobile phones, some of them even made movies on their mobile phones. In 2007. Absolutely incredible.
Later on, I graduated to calling Canada and the United States. Canadians were absolutely lovely: even if they couldn’t speak with you or simply didn’t want to, they sounded genuinely apologetic when they told you so. But nobody wanted to call the US. As I learned very quickly, my fellow Americans were the respondents most likely either to swear loudly at you once they realised you were a cold caller, or, if you were lucky, simply hang up without saying a word.
As someone with an American accent claiming to be calling from the UK, I was often met with immediate suspicion when I called any country. The usual response to my opening spiel was: ‘Hmm…you don’t sound English’. Consequently, I was frequently subjected to cunning tests designed to confirm that I was indeed where I claimed to be calling from. These fiendishly clever traps involved questions like ‘Oh yeah? What time is it over there?’ or, somewhat more weirdly, ‘What’s the weather like over there right now?’
Apart from the occasional interrogation, my experiences of calling perfect strangers ranged from pleasant to creepy to just plain astonishing. There was the member of the Royal New Zealand Navy who was conducting offshore exercises when I called, and who called me back when we got cut off. It was extremely kind of him, though I imagine his countrymen might have some concerns about national security if they found out. There was the Canadian woman of a certain age who asked, ‘What was your name again?’ and, after I responded, continued, ‘Well, Mary, you’re calling the town of [FORGOTTEN], population [ALSO FORGOTTEN]’, after which she proceeded to give me a brief history of her hometown. She eventually answered my questions because, as she said, my phone manner had been so impressively polite (for an American, presumably). Then there was the guy who asked me to send him a photo of myself before he would answer my questions, thereby accidentally stumbling onto the most effective way to get a cold caller to hang up on you hastily.
The most incredible experience of my cold calling career occurred during my last round of calls for the Mobinet survey. I was calling a randomly generated number from the southwest of the US and a young woman answered the phone. She had the usual scepticism regarding where I was calling from: ‘You sound American’. Yes, I confirmed, but I was a graduate student in the UK, having done my BA back in southern California. She pressed for where – I said Claremont McKenna College. 'No way! When?' 2002, I said. 'No way!.. Wait, what’s your name again?'
It turned out that we had indeed been in the same graduating class. Even more bizarrely, I hadn’t called her house: she was at the house of one of her boyfriend’s relatives, and that boyfriend had also been in my class, and was a very good friend of mine. Of all the phones in all the houses of all the obscure and roundabout connections in all the world, I had called that one. True story.
The hang-ups, swearing, oddities, and unexpected helpfulness I encountered during my time as a cold caller definitely made me feel as though I had been given a tiny glimpse of the best and worst of humanity. I may have even persuaded my mother to go easy on any cold callers who might ring her in the future. But if you’re a telemarketer and you’re reading this, don’t test the theory: just hang up. Immediately.
Professor Mary Flannery is a medievalist and author specialising in the literature and culture of late-medieval England. You can find her, and her handsome cat, Chester, at @15thcgossipgirl.
End of the Piers
Piers is back! Yes, Piers Morgan! Remember? He was a newspaper editor for a bit, hacked some phones, then inexplicably replaced Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent, then he was back here for a bit, back there for a bit, and now he’s back here again.
We’re meant to have some kind of strong opinion about him. That’s what the billboards are saying, anyway – here he is, half-angel and half-devil, painting him as one of British life’s most divisive characters. Rupert Murdoch has staked his bets on Piers igniting the nation with his strident, bombastic talking points, so contentious that families will turn on one another, fighting bareknuckle in the streets over every issue he brings up. A new force will be established, where TalkTV wields immense cultural and political power, opening up a new frontier by which to dominate public discourse for generations to come.
Oh wait, hang on, no – according to PopBitch, Piers is already registering a lowly five figures a day for his show nobody cares about on a channel nobody’s heard of. False alarm, everyone, back to work.
They Haven’t Gone Away (Yet), Y’know
Séamas O’Reilly, our features editor, casts his gimlet eye over the local election results and their portents.
The thing about being from Northern Ireland is that you’re not usually the subject of much UK election coverage. Usually, you show up toward the last five minutes of each hour on Election Night, when the Union’s bit-part players get a showing and the main presenters pop out to go to the toilet.
Part of this is, let’s not be coy, simply rank indifference on the part of the English media, but it’s true that most Northern Irish elections – when such things are logistically capable of taking place – have historically yielded fairly formulaic results.
This year, however, proved different, since something new did actually happen. So, before the Northern Irish electorate regress into the void like Dave McFly’s torso in Back To The Future, let’s try and freeze that Polaroid in place.
The headline is that Sinn Fein have become the single biggest party in the assembly which is, whatever the Unionist nay-sayers scrambling to dispute this would have you believe, inarguably big news. In fact, tHis IS, to coin a phrase, tHe ONE thinG DaVId lLoyD gEOrgE DIdn'T waNT to HapPeN.
The Northern Irish state was explicitly founded to prevent a nationalist party from having much say in Northern Irish politics at all; something known by every single Northern Irish person, but rarely expressed in public, which made Lewis Goodall’s “saying the quiet bit loud” moment on BBC News all the more telling.
So, whatever qualifiers are added by the Well, Actually brigades, Sinn Fein’s #1 ranking is a remarkable, if not extraordinary, achievement. Some of those qualifiers are, however, useful.
Sinn Fein’s success comes via a split within unionism that is only slightly less revolutionary than their own efforts, most specifically the first real blow to the DUP’s polity after five years of truly heroic ineptitude when it comes to Brexit.
Despite having campaigned on behalf of, agreed to, and signed up for, several successive iterations of the deal, they have also loudly denounced each, once it failed to deliver the unicorn they’d angrily imagined in their heads.
They are still, nominally, adherents to the Good Friday Agreement which would make a hard border nigh-on-impossible, but they also don’t want a border on the Irish Sea, insist on no compulsion for locally made goods to abide by EU regulations, and demand no friction for Northern Irish businesses who wish to trade with the Republic of Ireland.
Like a child, tears of exhaustion dripping onto the laminated menu of a family restaurant, there is no offering which will make them happy or, at the very least, allow them to appear on television with anything other than a face dangerously red with indignation.
Hanlon’s razor, that one must never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, is rendered blunt when faced with the DUP, for whom one must always ascribe both.
Despite, or possibly because of, their electoral supremacy for the past two decades, the DUP’s only setting is agonised persecution. Westminster-centric politicos have stained many a finger marvelling at the current vogue for using culture war posturing within the modern Conservative party, who ignore facts and very recent history so as to claim victimhood from their throne of near-total power. To those who follow Northern Irish politics, such efforts are small beer. The Tories have merely adopted this tactic, the DUP were born in it, molded by it. This election just appears to mark the first time they’ve suffered a significant electoral penalty as a result.
The Alliance Party won the most new seats of any party by a country mile, and did so by aiming a positive, outlooking vision squarely at the growing constituency of people for whom the national question is no longer the central plank of their politics. This itself represents a seismic which could prove every bit as momentous for all parties going forward.
However, their story of dogged, non-tribal appeals to a growing middle ground lacks the dark glamour of Irish republicanism on the march, and has thus found itself little more than a footnote in much of the reporting from the English press. It is, however, notable that both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael’s leaders congratulated them, and not their political rivals Sinn Fein, on their Stormont showing.
So, what of Sinn Fein’s victory? The fact is the party have proven themselves to be the canniest political operators in Ireland, north or south, for the past decade or more. Like the Alliance party, their policies are not just popular with their traditional constituents, but those who might not have considered themselves adherents in the past. This could be because they are capable of being expressed while their candidates are smiling, and not incandescent with a tired, futile rage.
A border poll could be likely in the next five years, but could also be stalled by the sort of political gridlock that gives every Northern Irish person a warm, fuzzy sense of nostalgia. The DUP keep going back and forth on whether they’ll take their seats in the Assembly which is definitely because of the protocol and not because of Sinn Fein’s victory, so what happens next is in the air. If a poll was to come to pass, current analysis seems to suggest support for reunification dawdles at 30-40%, but this is just as likely to change if the prospect of the vote becomes real.
Either way, when even TV ratings behemoth Piers Morgan is presaging the reunification of Ireland, some tipping point has likely been reached. Just don’t expect to hear much about it for a while.
The elections are over. We’ll go away now for a bit.
Séamas O’Reilly is a writer from Derry and features editor of The Fence. You can find him on Twitter at @shockproofbeats, and buy his award-winning and very good memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died at www.mammybook.com
Everyone Loves The Fence
If there’s one thing you can say about magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie, it’s that he knows his magazines. He sells them, he writes about them, talks about them, hosts events about them; search magCulture and they tell you from the jump, “We love magazines.” So if magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie is saying, in an interview with FIPPWorld, that if he had to take only three magazines to a desert island, one of them would be The Fence, then you can trust that he knows what he’s talking about.
Should you want to prepare for any possible desert island marooning in the near-future, our magazine is purchasable not only through our store and subscription service, but also, as mentioned above, at your local newsagents, provided that newsagents is a WH Smith.
In Case You Missed It
It’s been ten years since the first edition of Clive Martin’s Big Night Out series at VICE and it still holds up – treat yourself to a re-read.
Writing for the Baffler, John Merrick skilfully explores perspectives of class within nature writing, in this revisit of the late Barnsley-based novelist, Barry Hines.
John Phipps, our beloved fiction editor, profiles the Russian art dealer, Andre Ruzhnikov, for the 1843’s Londongrad special edition.
Azadeh Moaveni’s LRB report from the Polish-Ukrainian border, and the specific challenges faced by female refugees caught between a warzone and a natalist theocracy, is a heart-rending, masterful piece of crisis reportage.
The Fence’s deputy editor wrote a short history of Pimm’s while on the outs at another job a couple of years ago, absolutely no-one read it because it wasn’t posted online, but it was rediscovered by our editorial team and is now going in the newsletter in time for the coming heatwave.
And Finally
For a good decade, MTV’s Cribs was a cultural phenomenon. For the first time, viewers could be taken around on a house tour of the world’s rich and famous; gods of screen and stage leading you by the hand through their largesse, their excess, their indulgences. It was vulgar and hypnotic and envy-inducing, but in a way that put clear blue water between you and them – from Mariah Carey’s solid gold doors to 50 Cent’s strip club room.
Improbably, the genre has been revived to great success by Architectural Digest, but the focus has shifted away from maximalist gaudiness, and towards – as Kenny Everett might put it – the best possible taste. Ten years ago, you’d expect a rockstar like The Killers’ Brandon Flowers to live in some obnoxious Xanadu – and he does, but a different kind of obnoxiousness, trading fag-ends, movie posters and vintage Les Pauls for a tasteful ski-top shack in rural Utah. You’re not invited to gawk like Cribs, but instead to ogle and aspire, to feel genuinely envious rather than distantly impressed. Where’s the fun in that?
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That’s us done for this edition. As ever, if you have anything, anything at all, that you’d like to ask the editorial team, reply to this newsletter and we’ll be able to read it. Stay sharp, enjoy the sunshine, have fun and take care – we’ll see you next week, same time & same place.
All the best,
TF
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